158 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?

158 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet? therefore generate energy. There was a concern that if the right catalyst was accidentally introduced into the oceans they would solidify into polywater thus dooming the human race, or at the very least making water sports impossible! Feynman was consulted and stated, “If there were such a substance as polywater then there would have evolved an animal that eats water and excretes polywater, using the liberated energy as its power source. Since there is no such animal, polywater does not exist? Feynman's proof is an elegant indirect proof coupled with a syllogism. Polywater exists. Polywater is a lower energy form of the high- energy substance called water. Food is a high-energy substance that can be converted to a low energy substance by a process we shall call ‘being good to eat? All things on earth that are good to eat have something that eats them. Polywater is a food and therefore good to eat. Therefore an animal must exist that eats polywater. No such animal exists, so either something in our chain of logic is wrong, or the premise is unsound. Since the chain is sound, the original premise must be wrong: Polywater cannot exist. In short, Feynman’s proof says: if a thing is so, then the inevitable consequence is the evolution of something else, and since that something else does not exist, the original thing cannot be so. QED: disproof by nonexistent consequence. The polywater disproof neatly demonstrates the important elements of Feynman's Evolutionary proof. First, life must be continuously exposed to the thing in question, in this case water. This is clearly so as most life on planet Earth lives in the oceans or is intimately entwined with water. Evolution takes time, so enough time must be allowed for life to evolve. It must be a nearly linear problem so that a solution proceeds in steps where each step is an improvement and no step requires too high a level of mutation or adaption. We can illustrate the boundary between a linear problem and one requiring a step change by describing how triple drug therapy works in the treatment of AIDS. Until triple drug therapy entered the picture progress against AIDS had been a depressing story of drug discovery followed by the almost immediate evolution of the virus to evade the drug. The AIDS virus is a retrovirus with a shell composed of sugar molecules. It is almost trivial for an AIDS virus to mutate these outer markings to look different, even from one day to the next. This is the way the virus continually and nimbly evades our immune system. However, the AIDS virus does have some components that it can’t easily mutate because they are not merely aesthetic, they have a functional purpose. Why not target them? HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015848